[Haskell-cafe] Splitting off many/some from Alternative

[Brandon Allbery]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 21:01, Gregory Crosswhite <gcrosswhite at gmail.com>wrote:

> Also, frankly, I haven't seen much of a sign that the community itself has
> some kind of deep understanding of some/many that I lack.  People have been
> giving me different answers to my question, many of which are not
> consistent with each other, and some of which seem not to be consistent
> with themselves.  Regarding what to do about Alternative, I have been
> getting a whole range of answers, including:  do nothing but add more
> documentation, split some/many off from Alternative into a separate
> subclass, remove instances from Alternative got Maybe and [], etc.  So it's
> not as if there is this obvious and complete picture of what Alternative is
> or should be about that is available to nearly everyone here but me, an
> part of the reasons why I have been pushing so hard here is to see if we
> can work towards a consensus of some kind on this issue.
>

That's kinda where I am right now; I'm being told simultaneously that (a)
it makes sense to have Applicative and Alternative for Maybe, and (b) it
doesn't make sense to have many and some for Maybe, and (c) if you have
Applicative and Alternative then many and some automatically follow.
These statements are not mutually logically consistent, and leave me
wondering if Applicative and/or Alternative have been fully thought out.

-- 
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20111214/05aa775a/attachment.htm>